DEBORAH EDEN TULL

DEBORAH EDEN TULL, founder of Mindful Living Revolution, is a Zen Buddhist teacher, spiritual activist, author, animist, and facilitator of The Work That Reconnects, a field created by Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy for transforming our love and pain for our world into compassionate action. 

Eden teaches dharma intertwined with post-patriarchal thought and practices, resting upon a lived knowledge of our unity with the more than human world. She trained for seven and a half years as a Buddhist monk at the Zen Monastery Peace Center, a silent Zen monastery in the Sierra foothills, and has been teaching for over 20 years.

From the moment her Buddhist practice began, it has been a path of EcoDharma, centering the natural world as our eternal teacher. Having lived in or taught about sustainable communities and organic gardening/permaculture for decades, Eden weaves the essential wisdom of nature and experiential teachings on partnership with nature into everything she offers.

Eden has written 3 books in compassionate response to the polycrisis (ecological, social, spiritual, and systemic) of our times. Eden’s first book, The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide for the Sustainable Food Revolution (Process Media Self-Reliance Series), was published in September 2010 and her second book, Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Ourselves, Each Other, and the Planet, was published by Wisdom Publications in May 2018. Her newest book, Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown, was released by Shambhala Publications in September 2022. 

Eden’s teaching emphasizes relational presence and relational forms of knowing, acknowledging the personal, interpersonal, intrapersonal, transpersonal, societal, ecological, mystical, and global impacts of relational mindfulness. She has been immersed in an inquiry into the art of community since she was in high school and designed a major in college called Ecology, Community, and Social Change: Design for a Sustainable Future, in which she studied intentional earth-based communiities around the world. Eden has worked with a wide range of communities, secular and Buddhist, from meditators to concerned citizens, activists, leaders and change agents, to parents, schools, inner city youth, nonprofits, corporations, to women, to people who are incarcerated.

Eden taught for many years with UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, and served as a mentor for 5 years for their Training in Mindfulness Facilitation (TMF). She has been collaborating with Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers since 2012, on the topics of Regenerative Leadership, Women’s Leadership, and Sacred Activism. Responding to the call of facilitators in training wanting to deepen their embodiment of relational presence, Eden created a 6-month training, The Heart of Listening: On Behalf of Our Collective, a year-long training, Seeing With the Heart, and a two-year journey called Listening to the Invisible: A 2-Year Embodiment & Leadership Journey. She is passionate about the emergent movement of relational, regenerative, and embodied leadership within our world. She currently serves as a mentor for the Earth Awareness Teacher Training, an eight-month pilot program launching through a partnership between Sky Mind Retreats and the BESS Family Foundation

Eden has a special gift for facilitating mindful inquiry, somatic awareness, shadow work, trauma healing, and ancestral work, helping people release limiting beliefs and collective biases that have been passed down over generations. The Zen monastery where she trained with Cheri Huber was unique in that it weaved Buddhism with Jungian psychology and the work of bringing all parts of ourselves into wholeness and healing. Eden draws upon her own experience of navigating loss and grief, illness, injury, insecurity, and trauma, guiding people to embrace the the alchemy of darkness and light as teachers of love. Eden’s own healing path has been deeply supported by her training in conscious movement/dance as well as European shamanism and animism, and she weaves both into her teaching.

Her work has been featured in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Lion’s Roar, The Ecologist, and many other publications, and by The Shift Network, Esalen Institute, and the Omega Institute.

She spent 7 years living in the mountains of western North Carolina, originally Cherokee land, with her husband Mark, until the fall of 2024. When Hurricane Helene hit, they lost their home, all of their belongings, and nearly their lives, and are currently climate nomads on the path of recovery. Eden continues to offer retreats, trainings, mentorship, and consultations nationally and internationally, integrating presence and partnership with nature. 

Eden feels that the most important aspect of being a teacher is continually being a student. She immerses herself in trainings and retreats in an ongoing way, recognizing direct experience as our truest guide. She works closely with mentor Pam Weiss, author of A Bigger Sky: Awakening a Fierce Feminine Buddhism, to deepen her embodiment of Soto Zen Buddhism in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi.

Please read on below for more, in Eden’s own words. It is one thing to read about someone’s gifts and experience, and it’s easy to project onto teachers and leaders. If you feel called, we encourage you to connect with and experience Eden directly. Her presence is her greatest contribution and her vulnerability, sensitivity, and down-to-earthness are her most relevant gifts.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS FROM EDEN

“Every day, priests minutely examine the Law and endlessly chant complicated sutras. Before doing that, though, they should learn how to read the love letters sent by the wind. And the rain, the snow and moon.” - Ikkyu

Most of my life has been an inquiry into how to be of service in an age of global uncertainty, and how to inspire others to do the same. This past year I turned 50 and have been feeling appreciation for the wisdom of my younger self, who paved the way for my path and built the foundation for my life’s work at a young age. Heartbroken by the state of the world my generation has inherited and passionate about asking big questions, I have always sought outside-the-box teachers and visionaries who take us beyond the mind of separation and limitation, whether in the area of Buddhist practice, earth-based spirituality, ecological restoration, or social justice. My journey has taken me from city to farm and back many times, to intentional earth-based communities, to life as a Zen Buddhist monk, and now to life as a lay teacher and author who has learned through experience to build bridges between ancient tradition and creative forms of teaching and guiding transformation.

I was raised in a family of activists, artists, and free thinkers who inspired a life of curiosity and of questioning the dominant paradigm. My experience growing up in a family dedicated to social justice and community engagement instilled a love of service and a constant tenderness in my heart towards the grave challenges we all face today. It also inspired a recognition of the power of community as medicine for the individualism and powerlessness that is pervasive in the dominant paradigm. While I was raised in the city of Los Angeles, my grandparents and parents nourished my love for the wilderness and kinship with the more-than-human world throughout my childhood. This seeded the intersection between presence, partnership with nature, service, and sacred activism that is the core of my work. I am grateful to my family and my ancestors for the gifts they passed down to me - including both the light and the shadow. 

I also acknowledge - with respect - my personal experiences of grief, trauma, loss, and illness that have woven through this life. They have affirmed for me, continually, that both light and dark are our teachers, helping us to recognize that love is all we are here for. They have affirmed for me that our greatest strength is our vulnerability. Through dharma practice, the adversities I have faced have required me to continually reach far beyond the conditioned guidebook we are each given into the domain of curiosity, not knowing, inquiry, and the willingness to turn towards the whole of our human experience. This has nourished an unwavering faith in the capacity of the human heart for clear seeing, healing, and resiliency. This has nurtured a regenerative well of wonder towards what is possible when we bring our hearts together to meet our collective challenges.

At the age of 18, I began a daily meditation practice. That same year, I learned the art of organic gardening, farming, and permaculture. As my learning progressed, I began to recognize clear and subtle overlaps between these two compassionate disciplines for presence and partnership with nature. Putting my bare hands in the soil has been a source of truth and joy for me since then. I've studied organic farming with John Jeavons of Ecology Action and at such places as Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, California; at Arcosanti, a visionary urban ecology project in the Arizona desert where I co-operated the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture); as well as at the Zen monastery where I trained. At Hampshire College in the early 1990s, I created a self-designed major called Ecology, Community, and Social Change: Design for a Sustainable Future and wrote my thesis on Urban Gardening for Youth in Low-Income Communities. During this time I was supported to travel around the world for a full year focusing on intentional earth-based communities.

As the years progressed, I began to recognize that so many of the solutions humanity seeks already exist in the intelligent matrix of the natural world - but that the human ego seems to so often get in the way. I recognized the need for an embodied practice that re-awakens us to interbeing and holds us accountable to engaging in our world from the joyful responsibility of interdependence. This was, ultimately, what inspired me to become a Zen Buddhist monk at the age of 26, and to dedicate the rest of my life to finding creative ways to help people embody relational presence. And I began to humbly understand that spiritual maturity requires us to hold our shared challenges in deep listening, spaciousness, and discomfort resiliency, and the mind of "I don't know" rather than through binary perception or seeking conclusions.

When I exited the monastery after seven and one-half years, seeking direction, I asked Life to use me in service to healing. This path has taken the form of teaching dharma and leading retreats, writing books, guiding conscious movement/dance and community rituals in partnership with nature, and the founding of a non-profit organization. This has taken the form of marrying my beloved and becoming a steward of the land on which we live. This has taken the form of continuing to be a student  and allowing my practice to unfold and evolve in fresh ways, recognizing the importance of stepping outside the teacher's seat in order to remember who and what we are beyond roles and concepts. And this has taken the form of continuing to ask clear and emergent questions about what it means to live in loving service - particularly as the polycrisis we face continues to unfold in ways that feel increasingly overwhelming.  

What I am continually clear about is that we can only hold our global challenges and collective trauma together...and that the role of a good teacher is to affirm the space that affirms clear-seeing and emergent vision amidst division.

Through love of service, I feel a sincere commitment to making this work accessible and available to anyone who feels the call. You can learn about ways to get involved here.

Thanks to Jess Hopkins for the portraits of Eden.